Well, war has political objectives. It's not just about blowing things up. And presumably, some of these planets have some actual defenses.

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Right. A single starship can devastate a planet's surface, but it's hard to do that when you're also fending off an attack. Also, I would submit that the Federation (& to an extent, the Klingons, Romulans, & Cardassians) have rules of war to kill people in a nice way that doesn't harm their little ethics. This is why the Klingons went apeshit over Genesis; why the idea of the biogenic weapons on Celtris III tightened Starfleet's sphincter; why the use of said biogenics by the Maquis (& later Sisko) was such a shock; why the Son'a using subspace weapons freaked out...Geordi, was it? eventhough they never signed the treaty; why the Jem'Hadar blowing the shit out of lifeboats, adding anticoagulants to their weapons, & basically being bioengineered drug-addict cannon fodder was so demoralizing.

One photon torpedo set to high yield should have been enough to raze all of San Francisco and render it uninhabitable for centuries (antimatter = FAR more destructive than a nuclear blast). Why didn't the Breen do that? No good reason.

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Isn't the seat of the Federation government in Paris? That seems like a better place to start.

The Breen some how managed to not only reach Earth but attack San Fransisco. If they were so capable of reaching Earth why didn't they simply warp a cloaked asteroid into Earth orbit and have an engine attached to it that pushed it's speed up to close the speed of light and slam it into Earth and wipe out the planets surface?
Why do a regular attack with ships if you can get that close?

EDIT: Infact this is an idea the Xindi in ENT could have used. Why build a thing that huge and have it fire beam weapons? could have just built it and slammed it into Earth at full sublight speed and job's a good un.

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Because the planetary shields would just stop it much easier than a swarm of torpedos.

lol people on here really believe that Earth was unshielded and that Breen weapons put a small dent into the San Francisco bridge?

I don't remember any mentions of Earth having planetary shields. The largest object I remember hearing having a shield was Ty'Gokor and it was a planetoid. Even then you could question whether they meant the entire planetoid was protected by the shield or jut the Klingon military HQ on the surface.

Sol had a defense perimeter at Jupiter and Mars by BoBW, I'd assume that Earth would have some means of protection as well--given its significance to the UFP.

The Breen could've been cloaked until they reached orbit, dropped their cloaks and attacked. Very few Breen ships were said to have survived, it wasn't said just how they'd been destroyed, so orbital or surface-to-orbit weaponry could've been the cause.

I don't remember any mentions of Earth having planetary shields. The largest object I remember hearing having a shield was Ty'Gokor and it was a planetoid. Even then you could question whether they meant the entire planetoid was protected by the shield or jut the Klingon military HQ on the surface.

It doesn't have to be spelled out for the viewer, but assuming that there are no shields is crazy. Those shots from torpedos would destroy the entire city, or do you guys think that 2.5 kg of antimatter is equivalent of 500 lb airplane bomb as shown in that episode?

That was just bleed-through damage, all Breen were annihilated in what amounted to a suicide attack.

Betazed had defenses, there is no way Earth wouldn't. We even see the Earth security network in Homefront.